Dave Schratwieser walks away, while Jessica Dean ends up on CNN

Dave Schratwieser leaving Channel 29 later this month brings the local news market one step closer to abandoning journalism in favor of just spitting out information supplied by public relations professionals or official sources.

Schratwieser has long been among the last of a dying breed.

Throughout his career, which started in New Jersey and involved time at Channel 10 before Dave settled at Philadelphia’s Fox outlet, Schratwieser has cultivated sources, broke stories rather than catching up with them, and benefited from the trust he engendered by getting people to tell him things they might withhold from mere data gatherers.

Most people you see on local newscasts are television performers. They may be professional and proficient, but they don’t invest much in their stories or seek to originate much. Dave Schratwieser is a newsman.

That’s why he’ll be missed. He set an example, a standard, that was once the norm but is now the exception.

Best of all, Schratwieser was consistently excellent while never grandstanding.

He may talk about how he obtained a certain story or how his years of covering the police, and the ties that forged, help him get on a bead on a subject, but he was never the type to brag or act as if he was doing anything extraordinary.

Dave was just doing his job, a job he loved.

A time comes when no matter how much one enjoys what he’s doing, or how well he does it, other things besides work beckon. The work has been accomplished. It’s time to rest a little and let others inform viewers what’s going on in their world.

Dave has obviously reached that time. He earned his retirement and can be proud of a career that other journalists can admire and seek to emulate. Crime was Dave’s beat. More exactly, it was the police. He built a relationship with local police forces that helped him get access to information others didn’t, and to receive news tips in ways few colleagues could.

Just as Dave was relatively modest about his reporting achievements, he always seemed fair. No matter how close he may have been to commissioners and rankand-file, he never became a spokesperson for their point of view. He could be familiar but was always able to present his stories in an objective way. There was never a hint of leaning toward the police or favoring them unduly. There was respect for the story wherever the story landed. Unlike many you see on news programs today, particularly national cable news programs, Dave knew how to maintain proportion and perspective.

Schratwieser leaves Channel 29 after nearly 25 years on its news team. He came to the station in 1994, a few years after leaving Channel 10, where he was a general assignment reporter with a bent towards crime stories. Dave did not go directly from WCAU to WTXF. He spent some time in the interim on the other side of the fence, as a communications specialist for the New Jersey government in Trenton.

Once at Channel 29, he established himself on the police beat. He and retired Channel 3 reporter Walt Hunter defined police coverage. Theirs was a friendly rivalry, each breaking stories and having the sources that allowed them to do it. It will be interesting to see if anyone at any station steps into the void Hunter left and Schratwieser is leaving to bring the insight they did on local crime stories.

Or, as I posit so often, is that era of TV news gone, never to return again?

At least, Schratwieser’s scrappy Channel 29 colleague, Steve Keeley, is there to push further and go deeper than most.

But Schratwieser did his work without flash or anything that called attention to himself. It was the competence and consistency that made his name.

Not everyone can defy time and trends like Channel 6’s Jim Gardner and Vernon Odom, each of whom has been at WPVI for more than 40 years. It doesn’t surprise that Dave Schratwieser would want some rest from a beat that often had him at a news scene early in the morning and in the middle of the night.

He’s been at it so long, it just seemed as if he’d always be there.

Thank goodness he was. When the best of Philadelphia television is chronicled, Dave Schratwieser will be among the people most deserving of honor.

Good luck to you in whatever you do, Dave. Even if it’s just taking an earned rest.

Need I say you will be missed?

Jessica Dean at CNN

I’m often the one who says it’s better to wait and find out what’s happening than to speculate on it and make too many guesses.

So, of course, the day after I surmise where Jessica Dean may land after her departure last month from Channel 3, I find out exactly where she’s going, via a tweet she sends and something I read on Facebook.

She’s already in her next job as a reporter in CNN’s Washington bureau.

The move puts Dean in a position to cover a wide range of stories and to be seen nationally. She arrives in Washington as the town is abuzz with what might happen in next month’s midterm elections in which every House seat is being contended.

CNN is not a local station, but it shows up on local screens, so local viewers can continue to see Dean.

I, for one, will miss her as an anchor.

As I said in a recent column, I liked the tone and intelligence of her byplay with colleagues on the Channel 3 news team. I thought her side comments and between-stories patter had liveliness and presence of mind.

Such traits may serve her well at CNN.

A lot will depend on what she gets to cover. Washington right now is an interesting place to be with party politics in such flux and voters, if not the media, responding to parties spouting their most extreme stances instead of making a move toward the middle. (The media loves the shrillness and drama of the current political scene – They created it as much as reporting it. – so they favor news presentation as backfence gossip and petty squabbles rather than a genuine, incisive exploration of issues and differences. I hope Dean doesn’t get caught up in that.)

One more good luck is due. Good luck to you, Jessica. I hope CNN sends you amazing places and lets you view some remarkable and stimulating events, not to mention putting you in a position to meet some remarkable and stimulating people.

Your being there may give me a reason to watch more of CNN.

Right now, the only reason I tune in is to keep enough that I can comment from firsthand observation when I’m called upon to do so.

Foy’s acting continues to amaze

I saw an amazing performance, so real and nuanced I am inclined to anoint 2018 filmdom’s best supporting actress before I’ve seen half the eligible movies.

That actress has made an impact on television, so it’s not surprising she is so mesmerizing on the big screen.

It’s Claire Foy, who has received Emmys for the two seasons in which she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II on Netflix’s acclaimed series, “The Crown.”

The movie is “First Man,” a look at the 1969 moon landing that catapulted Neil Armstrong to legendary status and a story about how Armstrong may have been as emotionally suited to being a premiere astronaut as he was technically and intellectually suited.

Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, is getting most of the Oscar buzz.

For the second time this fall, I thought the wrong actor is getting the attention. As good as Glenn Close is in “The Wife,” I thought the richer, more outstanding performance was Jonathan Pryce’s as her husband.

Same thing with Gosling and Foy.

Gosling is wonderful. He is never self-conscious under the discipline and emotional withholding he shows in Armstrong. Gosling builds a natural shell that holds out all but the essential and protects Armstrong from being vulnerable to the range of feeling that he experienced at the time his toddler daughter, Karen, died from cancer.

His performance reveals both the confident leader and performer as well as the person who faces the toughest challenges of professional life but avoids any intrusion of upset in his private life.

Foy is even better. As Jan Armstrong, Neil’s first wife and the woman to whom he was married as the time of his moon walk, she exudes reality. You believe everything about this woman, who has a hard edge of her own. Foy shows few signs of acting. She is living as Jan Armstrong for the screen, and her subtlety speaks volumes and plumbs depths a showier, less organic a performance could not.

Foy impressed on “The Crown.”

She showed some of the traits as Elizabeth she brings to the tighter, more limited Jan Armstrong. That’s an ability to embrace a character and play its facets without ever suggesting, “Look at me. I’m playing someone famous” and going in for anything fake or superficial.

Foy was a great Elizabeth because she brought out the humanity of an iconic character and showed the Queen that has reigned through most of our lifetimes to be a complete woman capable of humor and warmth while keeping a reserve she considers fitting to her station at the head of a major state and symbol of a nation. She could portray Elizabeth’s best traits and warts without ever calling undue attention to either.

Jan Armstrong is not as famous or familiar to us as Elizabeth. Few, if any, of us have an opinion of her or her role in world or British politics. Yet Foy can make her live as vividly and make an indelible impression for the time “First Man” allows her.

Foy’s is a brilliant performance. I will be curious to see if it’s recognized at award time.

Neal Zoran’s television column appears every Monday.